Angry Birds and Empires & Allies this week’s gainer and loser among April’s Top 25 Facebook games

Each week, we take a look at six to seven games from the latest Top 25 Facebook Games and examine how their traffic has been doing since the list was posted, as well as how these changes might affect a title’s position on next month’s chart.

Here’s what we’ve looked at so far this month:

April 5, 2012: Pool Live Tour and Café World this week’s gainer and loser amongst April’s Top 25 Facebook games

18. Slotomania – Slot Machines

Playtika’s Slotomania – Slot Machines is up by 100,000 DAU to reach the 2 million mark. Casino games are increasing in popularity on Facebook, and the past few months have seen a rise of new slots titles. AppData shows Slotomania is still the most popular slots game on the social network — even though it’s one of the older ones — and it seems unlikely that it’ll start to lose traffic any time soon, but it may not move up more than a spot or two on next month’s chart because of the relatively minor traffic uptick.

17. Empires & Allies

Zynga’s Empires & Allies continues to lose traffic, dropping from 2.1 million DAU to 1.8 million over the past two weeks. The game was designed to appeal to mid-core strategy fans, but has had less success retaining players than Zynga’s “Ville” titles. Although Empires & Allies reached an impressive peak of 7.7 million DAU when it launched in June 2011 — thanks to cross promotion from other Zynga games like CityVille — traffic began bleeding out that August and has yet to recover. If Empires & Allies’s DAU continues to drop at this rate, it could be close to the bottom of our Top 25 for May.

16. Monster World

Wooga’s Monster World is another title that continues to show slow-but-steady growth, up to 2.3 million DAU from 2.2 million at the start of the month. The game launched in April 2010 and consistently gained DAU since then. In March and April, Monster World showed slight declines in traffic, with the game dropping from No. 15 to No. 16, but this new increase may drive the game back up. The game has seen small bounces like this for extended periods before — last time, from November 2011 to the beginning of January 2012 — before beginning another time of growth. If that pattern holds true, Monster World will probably start to noticeably gain DAU again by the end of April or the beginning of May, but it may stay in the same spot for next month’s Top 25.

15. Bubble Island

Wooga’s Bubble Island seems to be holding steady since the beginning of the month: After a slight drop, the game is back up to 2.3 million DAU. As with other Wooga titles, Bubble Island’s traffic shows steady traffic gains ever since its January 2010 launch. The game dropped three spots to No. 15 this April because it lost 400,000 DAU, but this was following a dramatic traffic surge between January and March that saw a new DAU record of 2.8 million. This was likely due to increased Facebook advertising, and Bubble Island’s DAU gain was approximately six times higher than normal. Now that the ad push seems to be over, it looks like Bubble Island may have leveled out but probably won’t advance any higher on May’s Top 25 list because major DAU differences between games aren’t uncommon at this point on the chart.

14. Angry Birds

Rovio’s Angry Birds is still attracting legions of fans on Facebook, having gained 800,000 DAU since April 1. The game launched in February and it has regularly topped our list of fastest-growing Facebook games since then. During March, Angry Birds went from 930,000 DAU to 2.6 million. Based on this month’s traffic patterns, the game looks like it might be able to double its DAU in time for May’s Top 25, but it’s a little too close to call. Angry Birds does look like it will at least make it to the No. 10 spot next month, since 3.6 million DAU was what Zynga Slingo needed to take that position for April.

T 12. المزرعة السعيدة (“Happy Farm”)

Halfquest’s Arabic farm sim Happy Farm continues to creep up the Top 25 charts, moving from No. 13 in March to tying for the No. 12 spot in April. Since April 1, the game lost 100,000 DAU after nearly two weeks of no perceptible growth. Happy Farm showed consistent DAU gains since it launched in July 2011, but it lost a little traffic since its March 25 peak of 3 million DAU. The game gained 400,000 DAU in March, but April doesn’t look like it will see a repeat of this performance. Even if Happy Farm continues to lose DAU, the game may only fall one or two spots for the May Top 25, since it has over 500,000 more DAU than the next biggest games.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for next week’s continuation of our Top 25 gainers and losers, when we look at No. 12 through No. 7 on the list.

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